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In Chariots They Ran

In the late 1970s, an idealistic producer struck out on his own to create a different kind of movie--a movie about self-sacrifice and moral courage, as embodied by two historic British runners. The result was Chariots of Fire.

ON A PLEASANT MARCH EVENING IN 1981, A YOUNG actor in the spring of his career made his way along Haymarket in the heart of London's West End theater district.

Casting his mind back, Nicholas Farrell recalls now that he was appearing in a play nearby, and figures that it must have brought him by chance past the Odeon Cinema, where his first movie was now playing. What he remembers clearly is his surprise at bumping into its producer, David Puttnam, standing on the sidewalk outside.

"There was a 'House Full' sign outside the cinema and David was very excited. He insisted on taking a photo of me next to the sign. He said, 'This is wonderful! You just don't know how wonderful this is!'" Farrell adds: "I think he knew it was good, but I think he'd made good things before that had just fizzled out."

Chariots of Fire would not fizzle out. Over the year that followed its limited release in the U.K., word-of-mouth enthusiasm fueled by critical acclaim in the United States would carry it to the Academy Award for Best Picture, one of four Oscars and countless other prizes it would go on to win around the world.

Three decades on, this story of race and religion, individual conscience and team loyalty, centered on the 1924 Summer Olympic Games, seems faintly quaint. Like a bottle bobbing up greenishly out of the past, it hymns the old virtues of honor and self-sacrifice with a fervor unalloyed by irony. That alone would single it out amidst the flotsam of 3-D blockbusters and teen comedies on any beach it might wash up on today. That it still resonates owes something to the passion that went into its making, but it is also about timing, and the echoes between then and now.

Chariots of Fire is a supremely escapist movie, and in 1981 there was plenty to escape. Just like today, daily life in Great Britain was darkened by anxiety, unemployment, and riots in the streets. There was a royal wedding to divert the masses—for Kate and William read Charles and Diana—and the U.S. public delighted in the royal dress-up as much as the Brits. It says it all that the two songs that seemed to be playing everywhere that year in Britain were Vangelis's elegiac theme music for Chariots of Fire—which would also top the U.S. charts after its Oscar triumph the following year—and The Specials' "Ghost Town," a haunting anthem for a collapsing society inspired by the sight of old women selling their possessions on the streets of Glasgow.

And just to underscore the parallels between the times, by an odd coincidence, the success of Chariots 30 years ago was mirrored last year by that of another nostalgia-laced, Oscar-winning movie focused on Britain's ruling class, The King's Speech.

But on that March evening in 1981, Farrell and Puttnam parted ways with only an inkling of what was to follow. For the latter, the movie's fate, and his with it, must even then have seemed to be hanging in the balance.

IT HAD BEEN PUTTNAM'S PROJECT FROM THE START, THREE LONG years before. Laid up with the flu in a rented house in Hollywood, where he was a producer with Casablanca Filmworks, he had reached for the one book on the shelf that looked interesting, a history of the Olympic Games up until 1948.

Here, he stumbled across a paragraph about Eric Liddell, the Scottish sprinter who had refused to run on a Sunday and had switched from the 100 meters to the 400 meters to win gold at the Paris Olympics. Looking back now, he says it had "echoes of everything I was looking for."

Puttnam, 37, was one of Hollywood's rising stars. He had earned respect with a number of imaginative projects from Bugsy Malone, a gangster movie made with child actors, to Ridley Scott's Napoleonic-era debut, The Duellists. He had also scored a worldwide hit with Midnight Express, which starred Brad Davis as an American drug smuggler tossed into the unwelcome embrace of a sadistic Turkish prison warden.

The film's caricature brutality won few marks for subtlety but proved to be box-office gold, with moviegoers cheering as Davis's character takes violent revenge on his persecutors. Puttnam was shocked by the audience's enthusiastic reaction to what he had imagined, when it was filmed, to be a chilling scene.

"I had had success with Midnight Express, but it was not the type of film I'd come into the industry to produce," he says now. "In this story [of Eric Liddell], I saw something not dissimilar to A Man for All Seasons," the tale of Thomas More's refusal to set aside his conscience by agreeing to the divorce of serial wife-botherer Henry VIII from Catherine of Aragon.

Puttnam has an idealistic, almost romantic view of what movies can achieve. As he said of A Man for All Seasons in a 1988 PBS interview: "The cinema allowed me for one moment to feel that everything decent in me had come together." His movies after Chariots reflected that view of the transforming power of moviemaking, from the quixotic environmentalism of Local Hero to the redemptive power of friendship in The Killing Fields and the crisis of conscience at the heart of The Mission.

For Puttnam, filming Liddell's story would send a flare into the Hollywood sky, a declaration of principle in a fickle universe. "It answered questions I was asking myself: What was I doing in this business? Could I really make a movie like this?"

Seized by the story, he searched for more. "I wrote to the Amateur Athletic Association of England, which sent me three huge scrapbooks covering 1922, 1923, and 1924, with a note saying, 'Please return after use.'" The story of Harold Abrahams, the Jewish sprinter running as much against anti-Semitism as his athletic rivals, emerged as a parallel tale to Liddell's Christian journey. Puttnam's contract with Casablanca had ended, and he returned to the U.K., determined to develop the film on his own.

Puttnam needed a scriptwriter and chose Colin Welland, an ebullient English writer and TV actor—who also appeared in the 1971 hit movie Straw Dogs—who combined a love of sport with the mordant wit and class consciousness of his native North of England, the country's industrial heartland. "English writing at the time was very cool," says Puttnam, "but Colin was about passion." Welland's script would win an Oscar and produce one of the more memorable acceptance speeches in history, with Welland roaring gleefully, "The British are coming!"

Welland threw himself into his research, scouring the archives of the British Film Institute for period clips of the runners and interviewing survivors of the events or their relatives, anyone who might have a story to tell. He also had the luck that would accompany the movie from day one. An ad in The Times of London turned up a box of letters written home by Aubrey Montague, who raced in the 3000-meter steeplechase in Paris. The letters, read by Nicholas Farrell as Montague, became almost verbatim the film's voice-over, with Welland changing only the greeting to Mum and Pa, Mummy and Daddy being a little too fey for the present day. By the end of 1979, he had produced a 25-page treatment, tentatively titled Runners.

TO DIRECT, PUTTNAM TAPPED HUGH HUDSON, ONE OF A string of British ad men who would make the jump to feature films in those years. Hudson, who had also made documentaries—his rarely shown Fangio, on the life of the Argentinian race-car driver Juan Manuel Fangio has cult status among gearheads—and had worked as second unit director on Midnight Express, was known as a bravura visual stylist.

But Puttnam also had other reasons for his choice. Hudson was a reluctant product of the upper classes, an alumnus of Eton College, no less. "Hudson's firsthand experience of a 'class-bound society,'" says Puttnam, "gave the film its authenticity." His distaste for the arrogance of privilege gives the movie an anti-establishment edge that was only reinforced during filming.

The Cambridge colleges where Abrahams ran and studied recoiled when they saw the script and refused Hudson access. "Gonville & Caius said anti-Semitism didn't exist at the college in the 1920s," Hudson says, still furious three decades on. "Trinity implied the same. Of course it exists. I can be critical because I've seen it at close quarters. I lived among those people."

For the athletes, Hudson and Puttnam chose to cast promising unknowns, the dew still on them, whom they would then surround with experienced pros. Casting began in 1979, and the older parts duly went to some of the great names of the English screen and stage: John Gielgud and Lindsay Anderson as the sneeringly anti-Semitic Cambridge University masters; Ian Holm as Abrahams's pugnacious running coach Sam Mussabini.

Hudson's confidence in them freed him to concentrate on his young charges, in whom he saw something of Abrahams and Liddell. "You felt that trepidation in the young actors. They were trying to do things in their lives, trying to become somebody." He was counting on that restless ambition emerging on-screen.

He remembers seeing Ben Cross, who would play the notoriously prickly Abrahams, in the musical Chicago, "and I liked all that angst and aggression, the chip on the shoulder of an outsider." Ian Charleson would have the fearsome task of playing Liddell, a man widely regarded as a secular saint, without making him dull or preachy. "He had a smallish part in Piaf," says Hudson, "and about halfway through David and I looked at each other and said, 'He's the one.' He could play anything."

Before final approval, though, they had to go through a different audition, at Chiswick Stadium in West London. Tom McNab, who coincidentally had won the Eric Liddell Memorial Trophy for best junior athlete in Scotland before becoming a top triple jumper and then a British Olympic coach, was drafted in as script adviser and consultant. "David said, 'Your job is to make sure the athletics look real. If it doesn't, we're stuffed.'"

The first look at the "31 skinny actors" who turned up in Chiswick was not encouraging. Hudson describes the audition as "a shambles." Sent out to run around the track, some of the actors stomped off in disgust after a few yards; others were parting with their breakfast after a few more. McNab, who had to choose potential Olympians, albeit 1924 Olympians, from this motley crew, sounds horrified still: "They weren't like American actors. I mean, Burt Reynolds was a halfback. Paul Newman drove race cars. Robert Redford was a good skier. But these [British] guys did for sport what Quasimodo did for coat hangers. They'd clearly never done anything. I picked out Ben Cross and Ian Charleson, and I heard Hugh and David let out sighs of relief. They were the ones they wanted."

Casting Lord Lindsay, the aristocratic hurdler, was even more difficult. A rising Scottish actor came down from Edinburgh to audition. According to McNab: "We put a hurdle up and he paled visibly. He refused to go over it. If he'd been a horse, you'd have shot him." Eventually, "they found Nigel [Havers], who looked as if he could hurdle. He didn't show fear of it, anyway." Havers, who had been playing blue bloods all his life, got the part.

As training began, there were a few early shudders about the actors' fitness—McNab says Charleson turned up at his house for the first time "and he'd pulled a muscle running for a bus!"—but excess of zeal seems to have been more of a problem. "I was doing 10-mile runs at one point," says Farrell, "getting a bit overkeen, and I sprained my foot. Tom said, 'Calm down.'"

Fitness wasn't the only issue. They had to look like athletes—a little easier task when their models were the gifted mortals of 1924. As Havers says: "You could get away with a certain physique." Where they could, the filmmakers made it easy on them. Though McNab says Havers was a competent hurdler, the obstacles in the film were 2'6" high rather than the regulation 3'.

The young actors turned up twice a week for training at Wormwood Scrubs Stadium in West London, hard by a notorious prison. Still unpaid, they arranged their schedules around collecting unemployment and whatever work they could find. They got by, though. And they got competitive. "They were like athletes in many ways," says McNab, "insecure, all about performance." He adds: "Most of these guys had athletic ability they had never tapped. Ben Cross got to the point that he thought he was fast. He said, 'What do you think I could run for the 100 meters, 11 flat?' I said, 'You'd be lucky if you could run 12.6.' I put a veteran female runner against him. She was over 50 and she slaughtered him over 40 yards. He never mentioned it again."

Havers, meanwhile, took a tumble while showing off his hurdling technique to Cross. He dislocated a shoulder and, as he waited in agony for an ambulance, realized with a sinking feeling that he had also broken a wrist. A cast would have ruled him out of the movie, so he taped it and disguised it with a sweater and later a huge wristband. Havers says, "The wrist never really recovered." But as shooting began, he was on the set.

After three months of boot camp, they all were. A fitter, faster bunch than when they started, they'd become a tight-knit group. They were friends, and it shows on-screen. As Havers says: "We were like a little Olympic outfit ourselves, a very close group. We forgot about the camera being on us. Hugh just let it roll."

FINANCING THE MOVIE POSED PROBLEMS OF A DIFFERENT order. Puttnam and Hudson may have been sold on the treatment, but it was tough to persuade anyone else to share their enthusiasm. (British film company Goldcrest did put up some money to help pay for the development of the script, but Hudson says, "It was the best investment they ever made. A few thousand dollars and they've been claiming the film as theirs ever since.")

Their first big break came at the 1979 Cannes Film Festival. As Puttnam and his former business partner, Sandy Lieberson, then president of 20th Century Fox, were falling asleep in a shared bedroom, Puttnam told him the story line of the movie. Lieberson liked it enough to put up half the $5.5 million Puttnam needed. The other half was tougher.

Hudson says: "The American studios rejected it. Why? Because the two main characters barely meet. There is no shoot-out at the end. They support each other because they are both running for Great Britain." He adds that after weeks touring the U.S. in a fruitless search for finance, "I remember sitting with David in a hotel room almost weeping. It seemed impossible to get anybody to understand why this was a film worth investing in."

Puttnam says it reached the point where "we were thinking of pulling the plug. That or remortgage the house. My wife said, 'Don't think twice. Just do it.' Luckily it didn't get to that." By 1981, Allied Stars, a British production outfit owned by Egyptian mogul Mohamed Al Fayed, agreed to stump up the other half.

There were strings attached. Fox, which Puttnam says developed cold feet about the movie after Lieberson left the company, demanded two American "marquee names" for the cast. And Allied Stars wanted a producer's credit for Al Fayed's son Dodi, who would later acquire a tragic kind of fame when he died in a Paris car crash alongside Princess Diana. Naturally enough, after more than a year searching for investors, Puttnam was not about to quibble over these details.

Finding a U.S. distributor was no less difficult. In a 25th anniversary film on the making of Chariots, Puttnam describes how the production head of one U.S. studio slipped out of a screening to answer the call of nature and failed to return. "We never saw him again." The head of sports for a major network, offered the project as a made-for-TV movie, "turned it down flat. He didn't want to buy it at any price. We were saved from going to TV because they didn't think it was good enough." Finally, Warner Bros. and Ladd Co. stepped in, treating it "like a newborn child."

It would still be a strain to bring Chariots in on budget, not least because producer and director were eager to give it an epic quality: They even took the cast to see Lawrence of Arabia before shooting began to show them the emotion and sweep they were after. Hudson kicked in ?70,000 of his own money to see it through preproduction. And Cambridge's late refusal to cooperate meant they started filming with a key sequence unbudgeted and unscheduled. "In my weekly progress reports [to Fox]," says Puttnam with a smile, "I somehow managed to evade the issue."

WELLAND'S JOB WAS TO CRAFT A WINNING STORY OUT of great raw material. It was not to make a documentary. The finished script included a string of elisions and inventions for dramatic effect, most significantly that Liddell discovered that the 100-meter heats were on a Sunday only as he was taking ship for France. In fact, he knew months before and trained for the 400 meters instead, though he was as much of an outsider in reality as he was in the film.

Abrahams, meanwhile, had already won his 100-meter gold before he was run down by Paddock, Scholz, and, yes, Liddell in the 200 meters, the only time they ever raced each other, whatever the movie says. Capturing the blue-ribbon event after he had lost once made for a redemptive climax, and better cinema.

More significant is the question of Abrahams's portrayal as a Jewish outsider running as much against anti-Semitism as his opponents. Though he seems to have encountered anti-Jewish hostility along the way, and to have drawn motivation from it in his running, he also went on to become a pillar of the English establishment—as did his two very successful, very sporting brothers—and in many ways the consummate insider. Not only did he convert to Catholicism in 1934, but as a U.K. athletics administrator, he argued against a boycott of the 1936 Olympics in Berlin to the consternation of many British Jews.

As for Sam Mussabini (real name, wonderfully, Scipio Africanus Mussabini), who in Ian Holm's brilliant hands almost steals the picture, McNab says that, while Mussabini was a fine conditioner and motivator, "he had no idea at all technically. He believed in forward-leaning all through the race, not just at the start. And he believed in a cross-arms movement, like a walker." Abrahams seems to have ignored him on both counts. As McNab says, he also "talked very matter-of-factly" about several supplements that might raise an eyebrow today: strychnine for dulling fatigue; cocaine lozenges as a stimulant.

It was, of course, a very different time in athletics. In Britain, not long before, the idea of training at all would have been seen as dreadfully poor form by the sport's upper-class custodians. And as McNab says, in 1924 coaching at the amateur level was almost nonexistent, and diet barely figured. "You ate what was put in front of you. Mostly it was university students competing because they were better fed than working-class lads. Any professional training was very much about the professionals."

Scotland was one of the hotbeds of professionalism, with large crowds flocking to watch, and bet on, the sprinters. McNab himself was once suspended by the amateur authorities after competing, and winning ?10, at a Scottish meet, and the sporting year still features handicapped professional races.

In Mussabini's day, McNab says, "They'd give you purges to clean out your stomach, and laxatives like Black Jack that would have gone through you like thunder. It was what they did with animals." Long-term health was irrelevant: "The pros were competing for big money, so they were peaking for one event at a time." Mussabini, who in real life was introduced to Abrahams by Liddell, "adopted a lot of the attitudes of the pros."

Ian Holm threw himself into the role, grilling McNab for hours about coaching, adding small touches to build the character. A very private man, Holm declined to be interviewed for this story, but McNab says it was he who thought of holding his cane above Abrahams's knees to force him into that high prancing gait designed to help him shorten his stride. Nicholas Farrell also recalls the scene "in that garret flat (in Paris) when he hears Harold Abrahams has won. He said to Hugh, 'Keep the camera running,' and at the end he grabs his hat and punches his hand through it. He took you with him as an audience completely."

CHARIOTS OF FIRE WAS SHOT IN LESS THAN THREE MONTHS under intense pressure, cast and crew constantly on the move between locations. With money tight, the shooting schedule had to be completed each day because they could not afford overruns. Thankfully, the locations made this possible. Hudson says, "We were in Scotland, which is a wonderful place to film: There is usually a filtered sun, constant changing of the light, and the most spectacular terrain. And then there was Cambridge, which is beautiful."

Barred from Trinity College, Hudson shot the Great Court Run, with Harold Abrahams beating Lord Lindsay to become the first man ever to make it around the inner courtyard before the clock tolls 12, at his old alma mater west of London. Eton's quad was dangerously tight, McNab says. Thankfully nobody was hurt, though history was a little roughed up. In actuality, Trinity's Great Court Run was first managed by one Lord David Burghley in 1927 (see "Who Beat the Clock?," above). A year later Burghley won the Olympic 400-meter hurdles in Amsterdam. He was the basis for Nigel Havers' character, but it seems he refused to allow his name to be used in the film because, always the competitor, it had him losing to Abrahams.

The filmmakers stayed lucky, even when luck seemed to have deserted them. Hudson remembers shooting that signature, and much-parodied, opening scene, actors and local athletes cut slow-motion running along a beach at St. Andrews in Scotland to the Vangelis theme tune (this before lolloping, to the horror of golf purists, across the fairway of the famous Old Course).

Hudson shot it to music. "I wanted the camera crew to get a feeling of movement, of this posse of greyhounds moving down the beach." The day was, he says, "Absolutely flat, dead, but as luck would have it, there was a scratch on the lens. We had them running through freezing water, and they had to come back and do it again. Luckily the next day was rougher, with a shifting sky and whitecaps on the water." It turned prose into poetry. "As Eric Liddell would have said, 'God was with us.'"

They were just as blessed shooting the movie's climactic scenes at the Paris Olympics. They found an old stadium a ferry-ride from Liverpool and transformed it, with scaffolding and flags and cutouts of spectators, into the Stades Colombes. They also wanted live bodies, 7,000 of them, for the main grandstand.

They advertised locally for extras on a holiday weekend, offering the chance to win prizes—including a Fiat car—to anyone who showed up and stayed until 5 o'clock. "Shooting on a holiday was very expensive, but we needed a crowd," says Hudson. "We had a start time of 9 o'clock, and at 8:45 the stadium was still empty. We looked at each other and said, 'This is a disaster,'—Puttnam calls it 'one of the most terrifying moments of my life'—and then we started to see them coming over the brow of the hill, in tens and then hundreds and then thousands."

About 2,500 turned up. They were given period hats and programs to wave, and Hudson and his crew took all the long shots and wide shots they needed. There was no CGI in those days, and in places it shows, but they had their Olympic Games. The Fiat was drawn for, and won, and the winner eventually tracked down. The rain, miraculously, held off, and the cast and crew came back for the close-ups the following day.

There was the odd mishap along the way. McNab recalls that they wanted to show pole-vaulters, "but steel poles weren't used until 1948. They found a bamboo pole that hadn't been used for 40 years, and got this good 4.40-meter pole vaulter who ran up and put the pole in the hole and the whole pole exploded."

They were a week setting up the stadium, with McNab showing the actors how to behave, digging holes for their feet in the cinder track with a trowel. Charleson had been working on Liddell's running style, head thrown back to the heavens and arms flailing as he approached the tape. Hudson says Liddell's sister Jennie later praised the portrayal, "but said the one thing we got wrong was that Eric never ran like that with his head back. 'You made him look very odd,' she said. But that was the one thing we did know," because there is the film to prove it.

Charleson, who had become wholly absorbed in the part, retreating to a cab to rewrite a postrace sermon in a way that captures Liddell's quiet appeal perfectly, concluded that when his head went back and he powered for the line, he was surrendering to faith, or as the film has it "to divine inspiration."

McNab sees it more prosaically. "When Liddell got tired, he started to roll about. You try to hold your shape through the whole race. When you start to lose it, the force goes all over the place. It was more divine desperation than divine inspiration."

BY THIS TIME, THE AMERICANS HAD ALSO ARRIVED. BRAD Davis and Dennis Christopher were hot properties at the time, Davis for his starring role in Midnight Express and Christopher for the cult bike movie Breaking Away. Puttnam says they agreed to work for little more than expenses.

"When David Puttnam called, you answered," says Christopher, adding that, "Frankly, I would've signed on to be John Gielgud's dresser." The two young stars arrived before they were due to start filming, riding up to Liverpool on the train from London. Davis was to play the flamboyant Charley Paddock, Olympic gold medalist and world record holder in the 100 meters, instantly recognizable for his trademark leap for the tape at the end of a race, in many ways the sport's first superstar.

(An alumnus of legendary coach Dean Cromwell's track program at USC and a virtual professional in an amateur world, Paddock appeared in a string of Hollywood movies after Paris, was engaged to silent film star Bebe Daniels, and was almost banned from the 1928 U.S. Olympic team for writing newspaper stories about his meets and appearing as himself on-screen. He would have merited a movie of his own.)

Davis, though, whose hard-partying lifestyle was beginning to overwhelm him and who was eager to soften his public image, wanted Dennis Christopher's less extrovert role as fellow sprinter Jackson Scholz. They discussed the switch on the train, but almost missed Liverpool, falling asleep and "almost having to jump off" before it hauled them back to London.

With time on their hands, and aided and abetted by Dodi Al Fayed, who Christopher says was very excited to be hanging out with his well-known American stars, they partied heavily enough to be ejected from two hotels before taking up residence in an unrestored wing of the landmark Adelphi, "a ghost city of a hotel where we could cause as much trouble as we wanted without anyone knowing."

McNab recalls his first impression when they arrived on set: "They were nice guys, but it wasn't going well. I said to David Puttnam, 'They don't seem to be listening to me. It's not that they're doing anything bad, but you'd need a Ouija board to get through to them.' He said, 'Don't worry, I'll sort it out.' And the next day they were fine." The partying was officially over.

Nicholas Farrell remembers Davis being very fit, for all the carousing. "He did a handstand and had someone hold his ankles, and he did push-ups in a handstand. I thought, That's taking it a bit far." Christopher confirms that "Brad was very gung-ho.

He really wanted to get into the thing. I'd already done this. I knew you can't turn yourself into a champion in two weeks."

He also knew a little bit about filming a race from Breaking Away, most obviously that what they were filming wasn't a real race. "At the beginning it was a pissing contest. Everyone wanted to show what they could do. I thought, Bollocks to this." He approached the cinematographer, David Watkin: "I'd say, 'Where does the frame end?' He'd say, 'That post.' So I put myself in a position where they'd fire the gun, the race would start, and I'd have the lead I needed."

Sadly, with cuts to be made, much of Davis's and Christopher's contributions never made it on-screen (nor did a shipboard romance for Eric Liddell). Originally, Christopher says, the rivalry between Brits and Yanks was more explicit. There was also more humor, with Paddock smuggling a flapper and a case of champagne into his quarters in two steamer trunks, and the U.S. coach lecturing sternly on the importance of a sex-free run-up to the Games. "We signed on to play Americans with a significant part in the movie," Christopher says. But the final version was "cut down because of time, for marketing purposes." As he also concedes: "Their main responsibility was to tell Ben and Ian's story."

According to Nigel Havers, one famous scene survived the cut only after he pleaded for it to be reinstated. It has Lindsay training in the sumptuous grounds of his stately home, the hurdles erected by the side of a lake and topped with champagne glasses. McNab says the aim was to show how "the upper classes busted their balls at everything they did, but they didn't want it to show. There always had to be a feeling of effortlessness." He suggested showing blood on the hurdles from the inside of Lindsay's ankle, a common hurdling injury. That didn't fly. "I said, 'What about putting matchboxes on the hurdles?'" as Burghley reportedly did. "But Colin said, 'No, that's far too mundane. We'll use champagne glasses.' We had to tape them to the top of the hurdles, which was fairly plebeian." Sadly, the champagne never arrived either. The beverage that Lindsay worked so hard to avoid spilling "was warm ginger beer."

THE MOMENT THE MUSIC STARTED," SAYS NIGEL HAVERS, "people moved forward in their seats." The Chariots of Fire theme, composed by Vangelis, was so critical to the feel of the movie that Hudson says "it was almost like another character in the film." The original idea was to use Vangelis's "L'Enfant"—which would underpin the romantic tension in The Year of Living Dangerously a few years later—but the Greek composer swore he could do better and went away to try.

"David and I gave him the chance," says Hudson, "but then he would have to come and play it to David. It was a kind of challenge." Shortly after, says Hudson, Puttnam and his wife were dining out in London when an excited Vangelis, who had tracked them down to the restaurant, "tipped up in his big Rolls Royce and asked them to come out. They climbed into the Roller, and he played his music over its big speakers. It blew them away." Hudson adds that "Vangelis told David, 'My father is a runner, and this is an anthem to him.' So there was a personal reverberation running through it." It was one of the first electronic sound tracks, and it won Vangelis an Oscar.

Almost everyone who worked on the movie seems to have won out somehow. The young actors, middle-aged now, remember it a little wistfully as a golden experience. "I thought every film after would be like this, but it wasn't," Havers says. "It was a very happy time. We ended shooting at Eton with the run against the clock. It was a beautiful midsummer day. I kept saying to Hugh, 'Are you sure you don't want to do another take?' And he'd say, 'No, I think I've got it.' I didn't want it to end."

Farrell says Puttnam's sense of mission helped convince them they had been part of something unrepeatable: "The delightful thing about the man is that he is so passionate. It seemed to me that he was always there in a constructive way. There was no sense of, 'Oh, my God, the producer.'

"When we finished filming," Farrell continues, "Puttnam sent every member of the crew, from the scaffolders to make-up people, a personal letter saying how he didn't think we'd get there and that, though it may not amount to anything, just looking at it, he feels proud. Then he took some points of profit and divided it about 140 ways, saying that everyone would get a tiny share of any profit, if it ever goes into profit. And for two decades, those checks came in—not huge but not unsubstantial." This, says Farrell, at a time when most producers were hiring armies of accountants to massage the numbers so their films would apparently never make money.

Chariots of Fire grossed more than $58 million in the U.S. alone, 10 times its budget, with Warner Bros. Entertainment marketing it cannily to every demographic they could find. Hudson says they even pushed it to churches as a Christian morality tale for the modern age. Its appeal is more universal than that.

Eric Liddell had died in 1945, in a Japanese concentration camp in China, where he had returned years before to work as a missionary. But when Colin Welland began his research in 1978, Harold Abrahams had only just passed away.

Welland went along to the memorial service, which inspired the opening scene of the movie. It returns to that London church at the close, with a stooping Nigel Havers telling a cadaverous Nicholas Farrell: "We ran them off their feet." But Hudson says that he and Puttnam were determined not to end the picture with "an old man in a memorial service."

Instead, they very deliberately bookended the movie with the boys on the beach in 1923, running through the surf and into the future, their lives ahead of them. It was about "the wind, the sea salt, and the pure physical joy of being young. It makes you want to run, and what could be better than that?"

Who Beat The Clock?

Yes, it was done, but only twice, and not by Abrahams

IN OCTOBER 2007, Sam Dobin heard the last chime of 12 a split-second after crossing the finish line in the courtyard of Trinity College, Cambridge. It was the moment he entered history as only the second man to finish the Great Court Run before the clock tolled its last.

The run that forms a centerpiece of Chariots of Fire was filmed at Eton College, but the traditional course takes runners approximately 370 meters around the Trinity courtyard. Its origins are obscure—hardly surprising since the college was founded by Henry VIII back in 1546—but for decades it has been run by optimistic freshmen on matriculation day. They run to win, but better still to make it round before the courtyard clock strikes the final note of 12, a time that varies between 43 and 44.5 seconds, depending on when the clock was wound.

Dobin was a 19-year-old student. Today, an economics teacher and athletics coach, he recalls that night's unrestrained celebration, the media swarm that had him waking at all hours for interviews with Australian radio, and details that disappeared from news accounts.

For one thing, he says, he did not run the same race as Lord David Burghley, who managed the feat in 1927 and went on to win Olympic 400-meter hurdle gold in Amsterdam the following year. Until recently, Dobin says, "You had to stick to the paving. Now they allow you to cut across the cobbles, which makes for curved corners rather than right angles."

Which makes Burghley's feat amazing, he says, even more so since "the rumor is he did it at midnight" as they used to before the dead hand of safety regulations outlawed it (though well-oiled students, pursued by college staff, still try), and probably after a big meal and a few drinks. Olympians Sebastian Coe and Steve Cram tried the same course in 1988, for charity and quite sober, and failed.